Solomon Gursky Was Here Read online

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Solomon Gursky Was Here

  MORDECAI RICHLER (1931–2001) wrote ten novels; numerous screenplays, essays, and children’s books; and several works of non-fiction. He gained international acclaim with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was later made into a movie. During his career, he was the recipient of dozens of literary awards, including two Governor General’s Awards, The Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Mordecai Richler was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001.

  Also by Mordecai Richler

  FICTION

  The Acrobats

  Son of a Smaller Hero

  A Choice of Enemies

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

  The Incomparable Atuk

  Cocksure

  The Street

  St. Urbain’s Horseman

  Joshua Then and Now

  Barney’s Version

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

  Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur

  Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case

  HISTORY

  Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country

  This Year in Jerusalem

  TRAVEL

  Images of Spain

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports

  Shovelling Trouble

  Notes on an Endangered Species and Others

  The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album

  Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions

  Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions

  On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It

  Dispatches from the Sporting Life

  MORDECAI RICHLER

  Solomon Gursky Was Here

  With an Introduction by David Bezmozgis

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 1989

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 1990, 2002

  Published in this edition, 2005

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  Copyright © Mordecai Richler, 1989

  Introduction copyright © David Bezmozgis, 2005

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  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN 0-14-305145-8

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  The following are used by permission:

  “Bei Mir Bist du Schon” by Jacob Jacobs (English version by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, music by Sholom Secunda). Copyright © 1937 by Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Extracts from Captain Al Cohol used by permission of the Department of Culture and Communications, Government of the Northwest Territories.

  “Future Generations” by Abraham Reisen, translated by Leonard Wolf in The Penguin Book of Modem Yiddish Verse. Copyright © 1987 by Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse and Chone Shmeruk. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books U.S.A. Inc.

  “Gerontion” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., London, U.K.

  “Heat Wave” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved including right of public performance for profit. Copyright renewed 1960 Irving Berlin. Used by permission of Warner/Chappell Music Canada Ltd.

  Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians by J.S. Woodsworth. Copyright © University of Toronto Press 1972. Reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press.

  The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus by Cyril Connolly. Copyright © 1981 by Deirdre Levi. Used by permission of Persea Books.

  For Florence

  Introduction

  by David Bezmozgis

  “I am thrice homeless,” wrote Gustav Mahler, “as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” A similar construction could be applied to Mordecai Richler: an anglophone in Quebec, a Jew in Canada, a Canadian throughout the world. But whereas Mahler felt the need—however conflicted—to assimilate, Richler wore his homelessness like a badge and built his career around it. All his books incorporate one or another of these identities—often all three. (Actually, a fourth and equally important identity, that of the writer, also factors into the equation.) And when I think about Richler’s work I think of the novels in which he gives voice to the sum of his preoccupations: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version. It was in these, his mature Montreal books, that Richler defined his style and his subject matter, and they constitute the core of his legacy. He once said: “I do feel forever rooted in St. Urbain Street. That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right.” Over the course of his career Richler not only acquainted readers—Canadian and otherwise— with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants, but he progressively asserted his little neighbourhood’s place in the grander scheme of Canada’s history and culture.

  When The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was published in 1959, St. Urbain Street and Montreal’s Jewish enclaves did not exist in the popular imagination. What little had been heard about Jewish Montreal had been heard from poets: Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and most notably, A.M. Klein. With Duddy Kravitz, though, Richler effectively put his corner of Montreal on the literary map. Other than the occ
asional side trip to the Laurentians, the book is set entirely in Montreal and, more precisely, in the environs of St. Urbain Street. Richler immerses the reader in the particularities of Jewish Montreal in the 1940s and 1950s, a world he portrays as vibrant, comic, cruel, pathetic, and perfectly self-contained. When the uniformed and uniformly Jewish Fletcher’s Field High cadets march down Esplanade Avenue, they pass

  the Jewish Old People’s Home where on the balcony above, bedecked with shawls and rugs, a stain of yellowing expressionless faces, women with little beards and men with sucked-in mouths, fussy nurses with thick legs and grandfathers whose sons had little time, a shrunken little woman who had survived a pogrom and two husbands and three strokes, and two followers of Rabbi Brott the Miracle Maker, watched squinting against the fierce wintry sun.

  “Jewish children in uniform?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not nice. For a Jewish boy a uniform is not so nice.”

  For a Canadian literature strongly identified with a rural and Protestant tradition, such writing represented a significant departure. And though later in the book Richler also notes a corn field, silo, and cows, the cows and fields exist for the sole purpose of firing Duddy’s entrepreneurial dreams: he wants to possess the fields, displace the cows, and build a summer resort for Montreal’s Jews. “A man without land is nobody,” Duddy’s grandfather declares. Not unlike the homesteaders who came before, Duddy also aspires to own a piece of the country, but he differs from them in his methods and motivations— the things that define character.

  If part of the challenge associated with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was to create a space within Canadian literature for St. Urbain Street, then the ongoing challenge for Richler was how to continue to develop this material. One way he accomplished this was to allow his stories to stray more and more from the epicentre of St. Urbain. In subsequent books—St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now—he set a considerable amount of the action in London and Spain, respectively. Though grounded in Montreal, the stories and the protagonists were more cosmopolitan. I assume this was partly a reflection of the change in Richler’s personal fortunes. In the 1950s he had been a young man hustling to make his name as a writer—an enterprise that bore no small resemblance to Duddy Kravitz’s “nervy” commercial pursuits—but in the 1960s and thereafter his heroes came to reflect the man Richler had become, a man legitimized by his success as an author. Still, I think there is more to this than the superficial association between a writer’s life and his art. Rich men can write about poor men, and often do. What stimulates a writer’s imagination is partly ingrained and enigmatic and partly volitional. And if in Duddy Kravitz Richler designed to introduce St. Urbain Street to Canada, in the latter books he set out to illustrate St. Urbain Street’s impact on Canada.

  Thirty years— 1959 to 1989 —separate The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz from Solomon Gursky Was Here. Over that time, Richler’s St. Urbain Street emerged definitively from obscurity. After the novels, the awards, and the film adaptations, no literate Canadian could admit to ignorance of Richler or St. Urbain. I don’t think it is possible to overstate the magnitude of such an achievement. To make a marginal community broadly accessible without diminishing it demands tremendous artistic skill and commitment. Before Solomon Gursky this is precisely what Richler had done: in the popular imagination, where there had been nothing, there now existed St. Urbain Street. This in itself was remarkable, but with Solomon Gursky Richler decided to take matters a step further. Audaciously, the novel imagines a Canada in which Jews are not marginal, but rather a Canada whose history is intimately affected by a mysterious Jewish confidence man and his offspring.

  The story of Solomon Gursky Was Here is the story of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish Canadian family. It begins in 1845 when Ephraim Gursky, the family’s progenitor, steals aboard the Erebus, one of two ships under the command of Sir John Franklin sailing in quest of the Northwest Passage. Two years later, when all the other members of the expedition perish, Ephraim and his accomplice, Izzy Gerber, emerge as the sole survivors. In classic picaresque style, Ephraim spends his remaining years embroiled in one scheme or another. He converts a band of Inuit to an idiosyncratic version of the Jewish faith; posing as one Reverend Horn he convinces dirt-poor Englishmen to travel to Gloriana, a utopian community in bountiful northern Saskatchewan; in the Quebec townships he masquerades as a Millenarian prophet and defrauds the local settlers of their land; in New Orleans he runs guns during the Civil War; during the gold rush he works as a piano player and cashier in a Dawson saloon. In ways both peculiar and intricate, Richler weaves each of these schemes into the fabric of the novel. Each of Ephraim’s schemes has consequences that affect the history of Canada and the lives of his descendants. Chief among these descendants is the eponymous Solomon Gursky, his middle grandchild. Solomon inherits his grandfather’s talents for charisma, adventure, and inscrutability, and lays the foundation for the family fortune with the winnings from a contentious poker game.

  More than any of Richler’s previous books, Solomon Gursky Was Here flirts with the line between truth and fiction. Richler variously cites the names of actual historical figures (Sir John Franklin, Meyer Lansky, Kurt Waldheim), fabricates characters from whole cloth (Ephraim Gursky, Solomon Gursky), and alters the biographies of recognizable people. The latter is what makes Solomon Gursky acutely provocative. The book’s central conceit invites the reader to draw a connection between the Gurskys and a prestigious, real-life Montreal Jewish family. In broad terms, the parallels between the two are unmistakable: a phenomenally wealthy family, operating a multi-generational, multi-billion-dollar liquor business, whose beginnings can be traced back to gangsters and rum-runners. Also unmistakable is the parallel drawn between a failed poet named L.B. Berger and A.M. Klein—both Jewish poets of a certain renown who accept the position of speechwriter to a whisky baron. The depictions of the Gurskys—particularly Bernard Gursky, the autocratic mastermind behind the family’s success—and of L.B. Berger are quite caustic. One gets the impression that Richler, now an established writer, wishes to raise the stakes, to further antagonize the establishment (literary, Jewish, Canadian nationalist), to really hunt big game. No quarter is given to any group or institution. Westmount WASPs, installed in mansions decorated with heraldic crests, are exposed as beneficiaries of Ephraim Gursky’s Millenarian scam; the Gurskys themselves, lionized by a sycophantic Jewish community, are riddled with dysfunction; an honest and upright customs agent, the son of Gloriana settlers, is revealed to be a xenophobe; a senior French-Canadian civil servant, champion of Québécois art, welcomes graft; and practically everyone who isn’t Jewish is an anti-Semite. The list goes on. It is as vast as Canada.

  There is a famous anecdote about a meeting between Richler and Saidye Bronfman, the matriarch of the wealthy Bronfman clan that provided the model for the Gurskys. The incident took place in 1976, at the film premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, some years before Richler began work on Solomon Gursky Was Here. Reportedly, Ms. Bronfman approached Richler and remarked that he had “come a long way for a boy from St. Urbain Street,” to which Richler replied that Ms. Bronfman had “come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife.” Besides being funny, the exchange is telling. It’s doubtful, after all, that even while daydreaming at Baron Byng High Richler could have conceived of the extent of his eventual fame and acceptance. Similarly—if the description in Solomon Gursky can be taken as authentic—when her bootlegging relatives were straining moonshine through loaves of rye bread it is unlikely that Ms. Bronfman could have imagined the scope of her family’s future wealth and prestige. The same, albeit on a less glamorous level, could be said for most of the Jews of St. Urbain Street. The intervening years between Duddy Kravitz and Solomon Gursky had been good to them. They had abandoned their coldwater flats for the suburbs and the conveniences of modern plumbing. They had integrated themselves into the larger society, which is another way of sa
ying that the larger society, to its credit, had evolved. Despite a less than impeccable record, Canada had become a more tolerant and hospitable place. Richler, selfappointed chronicler of the Montreal Jewish experience, could not ignore these facts. Their confluence created an atmosphere in which a book like Solomon Gursky Was Here could be written and published to wide acclaim. And though Richler satirizes everything under the northern sun and gleefully subverts all the sober Canadian literary conventions (the harsh life on the prairie, the perils of the high Arctic), the result is his most ambitious and most Canadian book.

  “Gerald Murphy got it wrong—living twice, maybe three times, is the best revenge.”

  Solomon Gursky in conversation with Tim Callaghan

  “Cyril once observed that the only reason for writing was to create a masterpiece. But if you haven’t got it in you to make a great work of art there is another option—you can become one.”

  Sir Hyman Kaplansky,

  as quoted in The Diaries of Lady Dorothy Ogilvie-Hunt

  Solomon Gursky Was Here

  One

  One

  One morning—during the record cold spell of 1851 —a big menacing black bird, the likes of which had never been seen before, soared over the crude mill town of Magog, swooping low again and again. Luther Hollis brought down the bird with his Springfield. Then the men saw a team of twelve yapping dogs emerging out of the wind and swirling snows of the frozen Lake Memphremagog. The dogs were pulling a long, heavily laden sled at the stem of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip. Ephraim pulled close to the shore and began to trudge up and down, searching the skies, an inhuman call, some sort of sad clacking noise, at once abandoned yet charged with hope, coming from the back of his throat.

  In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind. His inky black beard was snarled with icicles. “Crawling with white snakes,” one of them would say too late, remembering that day. But the eyes were hot, hot and piercing. “I say,” he asked, “what happened to my raven?”